the bereaved came to the ward to identify them
it was even less than useless. The form

of the problem they loved had vanished completely. Had
migrated to the dumb calm of the generic,

one man and woman for everyone. It went
much that way for weeks

until, a month later, the news caught something
even more terrifying by the toe

and held on tightly enough to tag it. A man
in New Poland, on the Northwest Side

had been seen walking out of a Kroger,
followed by one or two

witnesses of the eye,
then tracked by half the neighborhood

to a brownstone on Fuller. When the police
arrived, he was exactly what they'd found:

a living specimen. John
Doe, a flawless clone

or maybe the original
psychopomp of all those copies. The
look from his eyes was terror. It

swam through his body like water. The cops
cut the crowd and took him into custody.

Not a day later a woman in Collin Heights

was pulled off the Blue Line, her dress
and coat torn off her like wrapping paper,

naked and
begging, carried
by a dozen hands

to the nearest station. Within a half hour
they had an exact match

for the woman who had been taking
so many of their wives' and mothers'

faces. During
interrogation both ur-corpses

expressed nauseous bewilderment, paranoia
of their own skin. What had they

done to assume the forms of so many? What
were those vanishing likenesses

telling them, that death could remodel
their features to resemble them?

By decree of the state, they were
thrown on trial,
put to beg for absolution by a jury.
A verdict came back like an echo

from a resentment on borrowed ears:
to their own faces
we sentence them. Execution by

lethal mirror. A month later their bodies
went limp on the gurney. And almost

immediately, a postmortem miracle.
In the morgues and newfound graves
of Dead City

a hundred wayward corpses
were born again.

SUBMIT TO ME (Lydia's Dinners)

Lydia Lunch came
through town promoting
a cookbook, of all things.
Best if
cannibal cuisine,
but no: no humans died for these recipes.
In Richard Kern's

sick eye, breasts
sprouted all over
her full body;
the lens spied her
through the vamp

hex of her own
self-voyeurism.
But now she's
thirty years older, the final
realization. A
pin-up with porn
brains hooked up
to an electric
threat of
cackle. The Lower
East Side died and

left us this New York--
both arms and
fresh in black, both

legs, which bore
many men between
them. An interview
has her speak on pleasure,

but she speaks of
time alone, intro-
version,
the most contemporary
perversion. Her exes
she says will last
at most
two years. I always tell them so,
she says, then
smiles like
somebody's
broken religion. The
word slut is a
strange one. Means

what? I'm plural?
I want to be as
many people as I
can touch?
Seriously, what kind
of a toxic deal is
that? A lady lives many
lives, so we
shame her? Her

cooking, though,
how many could it
possibly feed? A
recipe, after all,
is only
a suggestion.

KYLE COMA-THOMPSON is author of two collections of short stories, The Lucky Body, and Night In The Sun.